Tajikistan has been on a steady march toward authoritarianism under strongman President Emomali Rahmon for years. The country’s March 1 parliamentary elections – criticized by international observers as flawed – confirmed that the journey is complete: the results removed the last vestiges of opposition from the rubber-stamp parliament.

Less than a month before elections to Tajikistan’s rubber-stamp parliament, members of the embattled opposition say the authoritarian-minded government is resorting to new tactics and old – sex tapes and arrests – to discredit them.

Saradedbek and his family run a local restaurant in Istaravshan, a city overlooked by hills in northern Tajikistan, serving traditional regional cuisine to customers including everyone from policemen to Lyuli, a Central Asian minority group distantly related to Roma.

Tajikistan’s public schools are known to be among the poorest in the former Soviet Union. Yet a highly-regarded network of private schools run by a group with ties to an embattled Turkish cleric is facing closure. The schools are caught in the middle of political maneuvering between Tajikistan and Turkey, according to some analysts.

Central Asia’s two least-developed countries, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, are both heavily dependent on Chinese investment these days. But now it appears Chinese investors are tiring of persistent uncertainty in Kyrgyzstan and are shunning the country in favor of neighboring Tajikistan.

Central Asia’s dependence on remittances from labor migrants in Russia has long given the Kremlin a powerful lever to manipulate the region’s politics. Now, new regulations are making finding work in Russia more costly and difficult for many Central Asian guest workers.

Visit a Moscow market, or courtyard, or construction site, and it’s easy to forget you are in Russia’s largest city, not Tajikistan or Uzbekistan. Central Asian languages resound all over the Russian capital.

Militants from the Islamic State (IS) group in Iraq have published a video saying that they have asked permission from the group's senior leadership to wage jihad in Tajikistan, RFE/RL's Tajik service has reported.

The year-long unrest and conflict in Ukraine that first escalated and then subsided had repercussions from Turkey in the west to Kyrgyzstan in the east, with governments attempting to stifle their own dissent at home or dealing in uncertainty with Putin's Russia. Even as the value of the ruble tumbled, Russia continued to flex its political muscles in the region, secu

Mehrangez is a university student in Dushanbe who says she has few opportunities to talk with native English speakers. So she didn't expect to understand much when she watched "The Great Gatsby" recently on Tajik television.